Saddam’s former translator gives us another justification for the war:
‘He wrote in a hurry. It was as if he had all these ideas he just wanted to get out and his formal pronouncements weren’t enough.’ To express even the simplest ideas, Saddam used a convoluted style full of subclauses, superfluous adjectives and boring digressions. ‘It was virtually impossible to translate into English because I had to chop up these endless sentences. Let’s just say Saddam was no Naguib Mahfouz.’
